I've done installations before when one machine control two video outputs efficiently. The problem now is that I need to do this in a bigger scale, like five or six laptops with double output each, so I need cheap devices. A friend of mine have six IBM Thinkpads T43 and he's willing to give them to me for almost nothing. However I think the Centrino cpu in them is not up to the task.

Is there anyway to optimize these machines for it? Or should I look for some decent netbooks?

but if they're just playing video or showing pictures, I guess it should be ok.

Also I wish people would stop making
"xxx amount of views and noone bothers to help me" posts

firstly they seems very ungrateful, secondly, chances are none of those 200 could help you, hence why they didn't post, instead of filling up with useless posts. if you want/need to bump for help, just do a polite bump. chances are people who can help see that post and hit the back button right away thinking that "ah, I don't want to anymore".

I'm only guessing but I would say 1 device for 1 display would cope, only a guess though, possibly could cope with two, but couldn't be 100% sure

That's what I thought. I tried to do that using an old aspire netbook with an atom chip and the video was quite slow. I still asked because many friends have told me that atoms are even slower than old Pentium 4's.

That's what I thought. I tried to do that using an old aspire netbook with an atom chip and the video was quite slow. I still asked because many friends have told me that atoms are even slower than old Pentium 4's.

I think it would have a lot to do with which onboard GPU they have too, if it is something half decent, NVidia or AMD with a decent amount of shared memory, you might get away with it, but the lesser powerful ones like Intel then it might struggle